AOL Open Mail Access

So, I have an AIM account, which is a free, unlimited storage mail option. But, I hate ads, and I want some additional functionality, so I use FastMail. Fine.

FastMail allows me to get mail from all my other accounts, by acting as a mail client using the POP protocol.

I thought it was working, but I'm getting failure messages about 2 of 5 times. I get those failures as messages in my mail box, which is pretty annoying. For some reason, I was using port 995, rather than 110. Probably trying to be secure, even though the FastMail POP Links don't have an option for SSL.

So, I visit the About Open Mail Access page, to try and see if I should be using a certain port. As it turns out they have this to say:

"About Open Mail Access

You can now send and receive your AOL/AIM e-mail using any e-mail program, as long as it supports the IMAP protocol. You get all the great features AOL/AIM e-mail has to offer and the flexibility to read and send e-mail via a third-party e-mail client.

Note: IMAP and POP3 are the major standards for reading e-mail. IMAP allows you to read your e-mail directly from the remote e-mail server and the e-mail will remain accessible on the e-mail server even if you use a different computer to access it later. POP3 requires you to download your e-mail to your computer before you can read it and the e-mail is deleted from the e-mail server as soon as it is downloaded, so the only copy of your e-mail is on the one computer used to read it. Due to security issues, e-mail programs that only use the POP3 protocol are unable to connect to the AOL/AIM Mail servers."

Fabulous. I'm going to change to port 110, and see if the message goes away. I'm really getting tired of deleting the failure messages. If not, then I'm going to get upset that FastMail doesn't support IMAP retrieval.

I guess I shouldn't be too upset. It isn't as if I receive mail at that address anyway.